In July 1905, Stanislaus Reilly’s student records indicate that he completed his electrical engineering course with full marks and was then admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, to do research in civil engineering in October 1905. Kettle speculates that Reilly lived at Jesus Lane with Margaret until 1907 or 1908. On his application he had stated that he had been educated at ‘schools in India’. In establishing what seems the most conclusive piece of evidence, Kettle sought the opinion of John Conway, a Fellow of the British Academy of Forensic Sciences. He examined the handwriting on the college application forms from 1904 and 1905 with a letter written by Sidney Reilly to his wife Pepita on 25 September 1925. Conway concluded that the three samples were all written by the same hand.5 Kettle also unearthed an application made by Stanislaus Reilly to join the Institute of Civil Engineers in May 1925, and found from the institute’s archives that Stanislaus Reilly had remained on the institute’s membership list until 1948, when Kettle presumes that SIS had his name removed.
When marshalled together, the pieces of evidence Kettle has assembled seem to establish almost beyond doubt that Stanislaus Reilly was a character whose background had been fabricated by Sidney Reilly in order to cover his past and to gain admission to the Royal School of Mines and to Trinity College, Cambridge. Subjected to closer examination, however, major faults are to be found running through his evidence.
Kettle’s enquiries were apparently set in motion after reading in Ace of Spies that Reilly had claimed to be a graduate of the Royal Institute of Mines in London.6 He therefore set about finding corroboration for this in the records of London University, eventually discovering an application form dated 5 September 1904, in the name of Stanislaus George Reilly. One can appreciate that the coincidence was uncanny. A person of a similar age to Sidney Reilly, with a Polish first name and an identical middle and family name, found at an institution Reilly himself had apparently claimed to have attended.
Sidney Reilly’s claim was to have studied chemistry not electrical engineering, however. Furthermore, the application form unearthed by Kettle was not a Royal School of Mines application, it was for the adjacent City and Guilds Central Technical College, which later became part of Imperial College, along with the Royal School of Mines, in 1907.7 At Trinity College, it is certainly the case that S.G. Reilly was admitted in October 1905 and lived at 8 Jesus Lane, Cambridge. However, he most certainly was not living at that address ‘with his wife Margaret’ for, as Cambridge City records affirm, the address was a lodging house offering single-room accommodation to individual students. The lodging house keeper during the time that S.G. Reilly lived there was Mrs L. Flatters.8 College minute books also indicate that S.G. Reilly took a keen part in extra-curricular activities and joined the Trinity College Boat Club on 14 October 1905.9 In terms of the hand-writing on the application forms allegedly matching that of Sidney Reilly’s, one should appreciate that even among handwriting experts, such pronouncements are not viewed as an exact science. Equally, it must also be recorded that John Conway was not a handwriting expert, his field of expertise lay in establishing whether or not documents were authentic.
While Kettle quite properly checked the details of Stanislaus Reilly’s birth, had he run a similar check on records of death he would have found that Stanislaus George Reilly died at the age of seventy-five, at Horton Hospital in Epsom, Surrey, on 13 June 1952.10
The death certificate is a key piece of evidence. It provides numerous leads to other documents concerning the administration of his estate, by which other family members can be traced. In this way, Stanislaus’s daughter Aline and nephew Noel were both located. They were able to provide details of their family history and in particular an account of Stanislaus’s life and career.11 From this, a check was carried out of contemporary British and Indian records, which authenticated their recollections.12 Indian residential records confirm that he was living in India until 1903, where he had worked as an overseer and an assistant engineer in Khandwah and Dharmpur. Due to the fact that he was in London and Cambridge between 1904 and 1907 he does not appear in the residential records during those years. On his return to India he married Aline’s mother, Edith Anne, at Agra in 1909. Aline was born two years later in Dehra Dun, shortly after which he became engineer and manager of the Dehri Rohtus Light Railway.13 On 11 June 1918 he was commissioned as second lieutenant in the Indian Army Reserve of Officers (Infantry), from where he was seconded to the Royal Engineers. A year later he was promoted to lieutenant and was promoted again to lieutenant-colonel before being released in 1920. The Reilly family returned to England before the outbreak of the Second World War, where Stanislaus was engaged as a civil engineer. Edith died in 194514 and Stanislaus’s health, too, declined after the war. In fact, his resignation from the Royal Institute of Mines in 1948 was for reasons of ill health and was certainly not the result of SIS machinations. It is therefore clear that Stanislaus George Reilly was in fact a real and distinctly separate person from Sidney George Reilly, and not the fabrication of Sidney Reilly or SIS.
APPENDIX THREE
THE FACTORY FIREMAN
The Kaiser was building a gigantic war machine… but British intelligence had no idea what kind of weapons were being forged inside Germany’s sprawling war plants. Reilly was sent to find out.
The story of how Reilly infiltrated the Krupps plant in Essen and made away with plans of Germany’s most secret weapons bears all the hallmarks of a classic Reilly storyline, with the courageous and resourceful ‘Master Spy’ triumphing against the odds. With a German foe, this story no doubt went down well with colleagues and friends just after the First World War. When first published in 1967, Robin Bruce Lockhart’s Ace of Spies maintained that this episode occurred in 1904. However, twenty years later, when he published Reilly: The First Man, 1909 is given as the date.2 The story itself, whether told by Lockhart, Nash or Van Der Rhoer3 is at least consistent.
In true Boys’ Own style, the tale opens with Reilly arriving in Essen in the guise of a Baltic German shipyard worker by the name of Karl Hahn.4 Having scrupulously prepared his cover by spending time at a Sheffield engineering firm learning the craft of a welder, he immediately secures a position as a welder at the plant and joins the works fire brigade, which enables him to move around at night without raising suspicion. The cunning Reilly then persuades the foreman in charge of the fire brigade that a complete set of plans of the plant are needed to indicate the position of fire extinguishers and hydrants. The plans are duly lodged in the foreman’s office for members of the brigade to consult, and Reilly sets about locating the secret plans.